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Three reasons why AppEnsure stands out in the APM marketplace

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Recently, I had the privilege to talk to Sri Chaganty, CTO and co founder of AppEnsure.

AppEnsure is probably the newest (as of Sep 2014) APM vendor entering this competitive yet lucrative market. As Sri walked me through the product, I had several ‘Wow, that’s way too cool’ moments. In this article, I would like to share some of the features that I thought were brilliant.

1. Up and running in minutes

Yes, it only took about 10 minutes for seeing the metrics and application flow in real time. There is no configuration required as the product does everything for you. Agents are installed on the client OS (note: OS, not the application) which collect metrics and send them to AppEnsure master (a virtual appliance) for processing. You get a nice, fast GUI to monitor your environment. Pretty straight forward. You can also install a desktop agent to monitor the real real end user experience.

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2. Any application, Any software platform, Anywhere.

That’s right. The agents don’t care about application, coding or platform. That’s because agents work at a way deeper level – like OSI layer 2 deep. The agents examine the network packets to identify application traffic. That’s how AppEnsure remains immune to the environment. You could be running in Windows or CentOS or whatever. And you could be on Physical or Virtual. Does not matter for AppEnsure agents.

Image source: appensure.com

StorageNetworkStack2

 3. Correlation and application flow – for real

Some APMs claim correlation by monitoring various subsystems without really identifying and organizing the transactions. AppEnsure monitors the interaction at the network level since it can see the conversation at a lower level. The system ‘learns’ the interactions as it goes and automatically determines baseline response times. Since AppEnsure captures response times for every hop, determining the root cause for an application slow down suddenly becomes very straight forward. When combined with a desktop agent,  AppEnsure provides the real end-to-end monitoring.

Image source: appensure.com

EndtoEndVisibility

As an added bonus, since the agents don’t get installed on the applications directly, there is no need to restart any applications (which is a pain in production environments)

While AppEnsure cannot provide application specific code level diagnostics, the value it adds to the enterprise cannot be undermined. For example, consider the following two alerts:

a. User login time to the portal has crossed 30 seconds

b. Number of Webcontainer threads in the WebLogic Application server has crossed the threshold of 40 (max 50).

While the second alert is awesome to have, it is the first alert that gets the IT operations to work. It is the response time that end user faces that counts. To that end, one may consider AppEnsure along side other diagnostic tools that can provide deeper diagnostics.

Also, AppEnsure can feed the metrics to Splunk which provides a secure way to analyze and visualize massive data. AppEnsure has an app that just got released to manage the splunk integration easily.

There you have it. As I always say, ‘Prevention is better than cure’. Don’t have that nagging feeling of whether or not all your systems are properly monitored. Get an APM solution implemented that can reap you the ROI right away, like in 10 minutes. Give AppEnsure a call if you need a demo to see if it can work for you. They have both on-premise and SaaS based solution. www.appensure.com or 1-408-330-2314.

Note: I’m not affiliated with any particular vendor nor I recommend any particular product. Selecting the right APM demands considerable amount of requirements definition and evaluation of several tools. The views expressed in this website are my personal views.

 


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